We stole the phones of the BSC boys and raided their camera apps to discover what they get up to when not on the road, in the studio or otherwise rockin’n’rollin’…
JOHN FRED YOUNG
“We were in Italy and I was doing my hand solo – y’know, when I do my drum solo and switch to my hands – when I accidentally hit the top of the cymbal stand, which has a metal washer. Dude, it just crushed it. So I had to play a whole arena tour with a broke hand. I couldn’t get it set until I got home, because I’d have had a big cast and wouldn’t have been able to play.”
“That was in Georgia. We were playing this club and they had this photo booth. And you can imagine that those pictures were the most gentlemanly ones that came out. The others weren’t really appropriate! Not too many rock bands would get in one of those photo booths, but I thought, ‘Man, we’re kinda four big kids anyway, so it’ll be cool…’”
“This was shot in Maui on April 18th - our wedding day. I think being family men has made us a lot stronger. Y’know, when you’re a band and you start out, you just want to go out and rock ‘n’ roll. And that’s great. But when you’ve got a wife and kids, man, it’s like, ‘You know what? I not only have to do this because I love it. I gotta do this because I got to feed people…!‘”
“That’s my daughter Scout, and we were just snoozing away. Being a dad is awesome, man. We were doing those arena shows last fall, and my wife was expecting: she was due November 8th, and we were getting home November 2nd. So I was like a cat sitting on glass, dude. That whole arena tour, I was so worried, like, ‘Baby, please don’t come early’. But it was good, man. We got home and she didn’t get here until November 15th.”
“We’d just played in New York with Rival Sons. So we load out of the gig and after about 45 minutes, we still can’t get our driver on the phone. So we were just sitting there on the street for about four hours, watching the nightlife of New York. This is probably three in the morning. You start counting the rats that are running by, y’know? We met some interesting characters that night.”
CHRIS ROBERTSON
“My dad is the reason I play guitar, man. His band do covers on the weekend, and I used to play all the time with them. I was home, so I went down to The Spillway in Kentucky, sat in with them for an hour and just played a bunch of classic rock stuff and old blues tunes. It’s good to go back, and remember why I started playing guitar in the first place.”
“Y’know, man – I just thought people should know that I clean up nice! That was a fun night for us. It only took fourteen years for us to get a number one! It was awesome. We ended up getting an ASCAP Award for one of the most played songs of the year, for Stay, from Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea. A country band called Florida Georgia Line recorded that song and it ended up being a number one. It was really cool for us, man, to see all the years of doing this pay off – and in a songwriting perspective too.”
“That was the last night of the arena tour at Wembley Arena. That show was overwhelming. We had opened up at Wembley for Alter Bridge, Def Leppard and Whitesnake, and it was amazing just to be the opening act. But then it’s like, ‘Holy shit, dude, I’m from Edmonton, Kentucky, and the band I’m in is gonna headline Wembley Arena’. There’s no words to describe the feelings you have when you walk out and it hits you.”
“That was about twelve days before Declan’s birthday. I tried every way in the world to be home for his birthday, but I couldn’t. There was just no way around it. We had to do the mainland Europe leg of the tour, then come over and do the arenas. I wanted this to be a little birthday thing, just for me, him and my wife at the house. He was really big into_ Finding Nemo_ at the time…”
BEN WELLS
“That was in London [at KOKO] when the guys from the label brought us those for silver sales of_ Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea_. It’s hanging on my wall at home right now, and I look at it every day as a reminder of how thankful we are. To some point, album sales matter, but we’re not too focused on that stuff. We make albums, to make fans, to come and see us live. That’s the big thing.”
“We played this show in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was a comic convention, which is kinda different for us. We walked around the show, and there were all kinds of people dressed up as comic book characters. So me, being a Star Wars fanatic, we had to get a selfie with a stormtrooper. I’ve got a bunch of old Star Wars toys at my house – it’s a nostalgia thing.”
“That’s our wedding day last September. We had to have a photo with our dog, Henry, because we love him to death. He’s like our son, basically. It was the perfect day. Our first dance was to Can’t Help Falling In Love, from the Elvis movie_ Blue Hawaii_. A lot of people don’t like wearing suits, but I don’t mind, as long as it’s one that I think is cool. Yeah, I’ve still got my festival wristbands on – they’ll stay on forever!”
JON LAWHON
“That was at Disney World. It was the first time my girls had ever ridden on a rollercoaster, and I found out on that trip that my kids are speed demons. They couldn’t get enough of it. They were trying to skip the traditional tea-cups, all that kind of stuff, and looking for the big, scary rollercoasters. And they’re only three and five years old.”
“That was in St. Augustine, Florida. I was born in West Palm, grew up in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is just north of St. Augustine by maybe 45 minutes. So when we took our vacation, I told our daughters, ‘We used to go to St. Augustine all the time, you’re gonna love it’. So we went down there, and of course – they did.”
